Good day, CIOs. Among the anomalies in technology is how Google Cloud has managed to lag behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp.'s Azure in market share for corporate cloud computing. With deep experience in AI not enough, Google Cloud, now under former Oracle Corp. president of product development Thomas Kurian, is betting on an old-school strategy: Boosting the sales team. The Wall Street Journal's Jay Greene has more.

Google Cloud grows up. As Mr. Greene notes, both AWS and Microsoft have the robust sales and service staffs that large corporate customers demand to support their technology needs. And so does Mr. Kurian's former employer, which has built a massive sales staff over decades. Google Cloud, until recently, had a different reputation: "It’s mostly built by the smartest people for the smartest people,” Forrester Research Principal Analyst Brian Hopkins told CIO Journal in November.

Taking a page from Oracle. “We are hiring some of the best talent from around the industry to grow our sales organization, and you will see us competing much more aggressively as we go forward,” Mr. Kurian said Tuesday at Goldman Sachs & Co.’s technology conference in San Francisco.

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United Technologies CDO backs effort to train female coders. The industrial conglomerate said it would invest more than $1 million in Girls Who Code, a nonprofit organization that provides intensive education in computer science to high schoolers. “Diverse people working together is how competitive differentiation comes to bear,” said UTC CDO Vince Campisi, who helped spearhead the partnership.

Gender parity. United Technologies was among several Fortune 500 companies that recently set a goal of achieving gender parity in senior leadership ranks by 2030, with an interim goal of 30% women in senior leadership roles by 2020.

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Pentagon drafts AI to fight wildfires. The Defense Department's new Joint Artificial Intelligence Center announced two new pilot projects Tuesday, one of which aims to analyze drone data to help predict the paths of wildfires and improve efforts to tackle them.

Wildfires? The WSJ reports that the Pentagon is focusing on tackling natural disasters after previously struggling to convince some companies to use their technology in military applications. The new strategy is to work with academia and industry to fast-track adoption of advanced data-management techniques.

Not on the menu: AI-enabled weapons systems. “We’re not looking at autonomous weapons systems right now,” program chief Lt. Gen. John “Jack” Shanahan tells the WSJ. The new unit also is developing ethical standards for the Defense Department’s use of AI.

IBM AI service goes multi-cloud.International Business Machines Corp. announced Tuesday that some Watson AI tools and services will work on rival cloud services such as Microsoft Corp.'s Azure and Amazon Web Services. "With most large organizations storing data across hybrid cloud environments, they need the freedom and choice to apply AI to their data wherever it is stored, said Rob Thomas, general manager, IBM Data and AI, in a press announcement.

A departure. 451 Research founder Nick Patience tells Fortune that move is “an acknowledgment by IBM that it’s a hybrid cloud world.” Tuesday's announcement also applies to data stored in customer data centers.

Kubernetes. To make it all happen, IBM cited open-source software called Kubernetes, which supports the creation and deployment of applications across platforms and servers. Notes IBM: "Based on the open-source Kubernetes technology, these new Watson microservices can be run on IBM Cloud, and other public, hybrid or multi-cloud environments."

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If online platforms can't identify clickbait and fakery ... A U.K. government report released Tuesday recommends that the government "place an obligation on the larger online platforms to improve how their users understand the origin of an article of news and the trustworthiness of its source." CNBC reports that the study was commissioned by British Prime Minster Theresa May in 2018 to investigate journalism's future.

Europe attempts to box-in the tech octopus. Although the recommendations are nonbinding, they come as regulators throughout Europe look to regulate a wide range of activities by online content platforms, including Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google.

Related. Apple Inc.'s planned aggregated news subscription business is facing resistance from major publishers over the company's plans to keep about 50% of subscription revenue, the WSJ reports. Another concern: Publishers likely wouldn’t get access to subscriber data, crucial for news organizations that seek to market their products to readers.

Russia to disconnect from internet. Internet providers there plan to briefly disconnect the country from the internet, says ZDNet, citing a report from Russian news agency RosBiznesKonsalting. According to the official line, the test is meant to ensure the stability of the Russian internet in the event of a massive cyberattack.

More are smartwatching. According to NPD Group, 16% of Americans own a smartwatch, up from 12% a year prior. TechCrunch has more.

That ping is coming from inside the house! Amazon.com Inc.'sMonday announcement that it was acquiring mesh Wi-Fi startup Eero marked big tech's latest effort to dominate the smart home (like they dominate with smart everything else). The WSJ reports that Amazon, Google and others have been racing to use voice assistants to control everyday devices to promote their services—and glean consumer data.

New meaning to "couch potatoes." Scientists at the University of Oxford, using data on more than 350,000 adolescents, found tech use produced little effect on psychological well-being. Scientific American reports that the measured effect—less than half a percent away from feeling A-OK—compared with that caused by eating potatoes.

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Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, the infamous Mexican drug lord who escaped twice from maximum-security prisons, was convicted by a U.S. jury of 10 criminal counts in connection with his narcotics empire. (WSJ)